


New Lantea

by NebulousMistress



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Contains Science, Gen, Planetary History
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 10:09:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7431969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NebulousMistress/pseuds/NebulousMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>New Lantea did not always look like this. But then, its star has gotten old and orange. Things have changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Lantea

**Author's Note:**

> I studied a decent amount of theoretical exoplanetary biology for my thesis. New Lantea's star is gonna be a red giant in 48,000 years and it's still habitable now?! That poor planet has already been through so much...

Five moons.

Five moons around a wet ocean world, all circling an aging star.

The world might once have been called a snowball earth, an ice crust over a salt ocean and a sea floor mantle of rock and pressurized ice. Water teeming with life down in the hot depths and volcanic vents. Water flowed just beneath the ice at the subsolar band as the planet orbited beyond the outer edge of the habitable zone.

The star was once a yellow dwarf. But the star aged and its habitable zone moved.

Puffed, orange, angry, the star glared down onto its icy little world with its five moons. The ice began to melt, recede. The water crust began to evaporate and an atmosphere bloomed. And then, in the south, the mantle poked out of the water for the first time.

For the first time, life found land.

The plants moved first, spreading quickly onto new opportunities, eating the starlight and exhaling poisonous oxygen. Rain pounded the rocks as weathering began to steal the air's carbon.

The atmosphere cooled. The boil stopped, the rock mantle merely peeking out from beneath the water crust.

Yet life still moved onto land. Fish crawled, worms slithered, snakes climbed. Tiny crustaceans skittered under new leaves, leaves that slowly began to suffer under starlight turned white to yellow to hot angry orange.

The five moons did their work. Their orbital resonance had meant tidal heating to the snowball earth, meant nothing to the eternal water crust. But now, resonance meant great looming tides. Each moon with its tiny tide, waves splashing up onto the mantle, bathing the plants with warm wet salt. Tiny tides building as lunar orbits aligned to the enormous tidal bulge that swept away the weak and fed the strong until the tiny tides returned to placate the survivors.

And still the star burned orange, puffing out a little more with every tide, every orbit.

The world began to heat again. The northern storm swirled as the winds filled with vapor, as the water crust grew shallower and shallower.

Life on land didn't mind. The rock islands spread, becoming a southern continent. Plants became tree ferns, grasses, palms, flowers. Fish learned to walk, then run. Snakes learned venom, chasing the running fish. Crustaceans hardened their shells and scuttled to claim every rock. Some even learned to fly.

The great water crust, once miles deep and encased in ice, was now just a sea.

The orange star grew, puffed into a subgiant, its core becoming dangerously degenerate, but the world didn't notice. The star had changed, the world had changed, but it still teemed with life. Life adapted to the loss of the ice, the loss of the water crust, it would soon adapt to the loss of the sea entirely.

The world would continue, uncaring and unafraid, even as the flying city splashed onto its seas.

The world continues, even as the flying city leaves.

The world continues with its five moons, slowly heating as its crust of water, its final shallow sea boils away and its life learns to live in the harsh desert. As the runaway greenhouse finally takes the last of its surface life, leaving only that which flies and floats in the air high above the burning mantle.

Until the orange star turns giant and red, just for a moment. Until the star's degenerate core bursts into flame and carbon ash. Until the helium flash boils away the atmosphere and the world ends.


End file.
